Charles Baxter's
collection of critical essays, Burning
Down the House, is, like other good books about writing, very much about
reading. He also has a small book in the Graywolf "Art of" Series,
(which he edits) entitled The Art of
Subtext: Beyond Plot, which he says is largely based on a number of
"close readings," mainly of short stories, in which he acts as a
"critic-sleuth," trying to reveal how writers get at the "half-visible
and the unspoken," which constitute what some critics like to call
"subtext."
I said in an
earlier blog that I was suspicious of the word "subtext," for it
seems to me to be merely a new term for an old concept. And Baxter admits that
he is certainly not the first to argue that a good story is energized more by
what it implies than what it states—"the half visible and the
unspoken." Chekhov once said that it is always better to say too little
than too much, although he coyly said he was not sure why. And of course,
there's Hemingway's famous claim that if a writer of prose "knows
enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the
reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those
things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of
movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."
Subtext, as used by recent critics and
writing teachers, refers to the complex significance that underlies or inheres
within a story—some sense of human mystery that transcends mere plot and
character configuration. Many other writers have talked about it. A story, Flannery O'Connor says, "is a way to say
something that can't be said in any other way, and it takes every word in the
story to say what the meaning is. You
tell a story because a statement would be inadequate."
And Eudora Welty
once said: "The first thing
we see about a story is its mystery. And
in the best stories, we return at the last to see mystery again. Every good story has mystery--not the
puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As
we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not
necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows more beautiful."
More
recently, Robert Boswell, talks to aspiring writers about subtextual implication
in his book The Half-known World: “If
the writer’s goal is ‘literary fiction’ [one of his or her responsibilities] is
the creation of a half-known world. To accomplish this, the writer must suggest
a dimension to the fictional reality that escapes comprehension.”
Subtext, the way Baxter
uses the term, means the story as significance rather than the story as event. For
example, in John Cheever's story "The Swimmer," while the surface
text is about a man swimming home through backyard pools, the subject of the
subtext, according to Baxter, is about impulses that become repetitive
addictions leading to the derailment of ordinary life.
Chekhov's "Lady with
the Dog," says Baxter, is on the surface, about a man who has an affair,
whereas its subtext is about a man who discovers that what he thought he wanted
is not what he truly wants at all, but rather something he had not asked for or
even known about. J. F. Powers' story "The Valiant Woman" is, on the
surface about a priest and his housekeeper, whereas its subtext is about what
Baxter calls the "grievous injustices" of marriage.
Many writers who are also
in business of teaching others how to write use the concept of subtext. David
Baboulene, who says he is working on a full-length book on subtext, has
published two books on the nature of story in which he introduces the
importance of the concept. In Story Theory, 2014, Baboulene says his
great discovery about subtext is that a writer does not work with subtext, that
"it's entirely wrong-headed, as a writer, to even think about
subtext." What a writer does is
create "knowledge gaps" in the story so the reader can create the
subtext. Baboulene's basic definition of story is "any form of
communication that includes knowledge gaps in the telling."
The idea of an underlying meaning in a story has been around
at least since Edgar Allan Poe's discussions of the short story. Poe was the first to make a distinction
between plot, or "what happens next" and pattern, or "what the
story means. He distinguishes between the usual notion of plot as merely those
events which occur one after another and arouse suspense and his own definition
of plot as an overall pattern, design, or unity. Poe emphasizes that by
"plot" he means pattern and design, not simply the temporal
progression of events. Only pattern can make the separate elements of the work
meaningful, not mere realistic cause-and-effect.
There is little doubt that Poe was, if nothing else, a
thoroughgoing formalist, always more interested in the work's pattern,
structure, conventions, and techniques than its reference to the external world.
For Poe the overall design was not a pre-established intention, totally in the
mind of the writer before the work's composition, but rather that the pattern
of the work was achieved in the actual working out of the work.
The 1842 Hawthorne review is of course the central document
for understanding Poe's contribution to the theory of the short story. What is most important in the literary work
is unity; however, unity can only be achieved in a work which the reader can
hold in the mind all at once. After the
poem, traditionally the highest of high literary art, Poe says that the short
tale has the most potential for being unified in the way the poem is. The
effect of the tale is synonymous with its overall pattern or design, which is
also synonymous with its theme or idea.
Form and meaning emerge from the unity of the motifs of the story.
According to the Russian
formalists, we can think of details in a story that are there merely to give us
a sense of actuality as being relatively "loose" and even dispensable,
or at least changeable. Details that are in the story because they are relevant
to its meaning or overall rhetorical effect we can think of as being relatively
"bound" to the story, that is, intrinsic and not easily detachable or
changeable. Trying to determine which
details in a story are "loose" and which are "bound" is one
of the most important skills for reading stories effectively. One of the most
important ways we can determine which details are bound and which are loose is
by applying the principle of redundancy or repetition: if a certain detail or kind of detail is
mentioned more than once or twice in a story, we might suspect that it is
relevant in some way.
The circulation in
American universities of the central ideas of the New Criticism, also called "formalist,"
"contextual," or "objective" criticism, was mainly due to
the publication of two highly influential literature textbooks in the 1930s by Cleanth
Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: Understanding
Fiction and Understanding Poetry. The
most basic and pervasive premise of the New Criticism was that the meaning of a
work is not equivalent to what the artist "intended" when he wrote
it, for poetic language is so highly connotative that the ultimate meaning of a
work of art exceeds any original intention. To get at a work's meaning the
reader had to engage in a close analytical reading. The assumption was that the
work was a highly unified object that communicated something significant about
human experience by the choice and arrangement of its individual parts.
New Critics felt that the
work's theme was too complex to be reduced to some discursive idea purposely
placed within the poem by the author, which could be plucked out by the reader
like a raisin from a cake. In a central essay on the subject entitled "The Language of Paradox," Cleanth
Brooks argued that whereas the scientist wants to freeze language into widely-agreed
upon denotations, literature is always breaking up these agreements in
perpetually new ways. The primary device for achieving this constant break-up
is metaphor, and metaphor, argued the New Critics, is by its very nature always
ironic and paradoxical. Thus the values sought after in poetry by the New
Critics were those of complexity, irony, tension, and paradox.
According to Russian Formalists
Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky, when approaching fiction one must make
an initial distinction between the series of events which a writer takes as his
subject matter and the specific structure that results when the writer presents
the completed piece of fiction to the reader. Although one may be tempted to
think of both these series of events as the same, formalists saw the former as
merely the raw material, whereas the latter is the transformation of the raw
material by means of purely literary conventions or devices. The Russian Formalist notion of narrative structure
that later proved highly influential is the concept of a "motif" as
being the smallest particle of thematic material in a story, organized in
strategically justifiable ways which the Russian Formalists call
"motivation."
As I say, this is all old
stuff, but every once in a while, a critic seems to discover the concept as if
it were brand new. One example I ran across in doing the research for this blog
was an article by Dan Shen entitled" 'Overall-Extended Close Reading' and Subtexts
of Short Stories," English Studies 91
(April 2010). Shen, Changiang Professor of English at Peking University, notes
that close reading, after being discredited for a time as conservative and
limited, is showing signs of return. This should not be surprising, given the fact
that regardless of what critical trend sweeps through graduate
programs—theoretical, social, political, biographical, etc.—it is inevitable
that there will always be a return to a close reading of the literary work.
Shen proposes what she
calls "overall-extended close reading, "which she says is
particularly useful in investigating
"subtexts of short stories." She suggests the following three parts
of her so-called "new" methodology: (1) examining "local
elements in relation to their global function, taking into account the
interaction among textual details in different parts of the narrative; (2)
taking into account the socio-historical contexts of the work; (3) paying
attention to intertextual relations by comparing the text to related texts.
Anyone familiar with
modern literary criticism since the New Criticism will see that this proposal
is hardly original, for it simply suggests that close reading should not ignore
a social and an intertextual context.
Shen chooses Stephen
Crane's story "An Episode of War" to illustrate her "new"
strategy, arguing that previous critics' failure to consider the interaction
among "local elements" in the story and insufficient attention to
intertextual and extra textual relations have resulted in a failure to perceive
a "most essential subtext" in the story, whereas her "overall
extended close reading" has enabled her to see a "macrostructural
satirical strategy—"feminization" which consistently deprives the protagonist and his
comrades of masculinity as a most important cornerstone of traditional
heroism."
The "local
elements" Shen picks out in the story—the lieutenant dividing coffee, a simile
of a girls boarding school, his crying out when shot — what she calls all
typical feminine behaviors dramatize the soldier in the story as being like a
"weak and vulnerable female."
She also notes several similes of child-like behavior, e.g. "Don't
be a baby," which she calls "childization," which reinforces the
"macrostructure" of feminization.
She concludes that this feminization strategy has eluded generations of
critics because of the "bondage of conventional interpretative
frames," (whatever that means). She
cites a Crane poem and his story
"Mystery of Heroism" to provide a social and intertextual context for
his attitude to war.
I mention Professor Shen's
discussion of subtext in Crane's "Episode of War" to illustrate that
simply because a critic adopts a new term does not mean that said critic has
access to the underlying significance of a story. I suggest that Professor Shen's picking out references
to traditional "feminine" behavior simply refers to a common cultural
cliché that if a man does not face an injury with a stiff upper lip and a
straight face, he risks being called a "sissy," or in some circles he
is referred to by the vulgar metonymy whereby men reduce women to their genitals.
In a piece I published a
piece on Crane's story "An Episode of War" some forty years ago, I
suggested a "reading" of the "subtext," (without using that
term) that integrated many more of what Shen calls "local elements"
in the story than the simple cultural cliché of being a "sissy" and
thus justified the story as embodying a much more universal theme typical of
Crane's philosophic point of view in such stories as "The Open Boat,"
"The Blue Hotel," and others.
Although the title of Stephen Crane's short story "An
Episode of War" obviously points to an event somehow related to a national
conflict, the central character, a lieutenant, is not engaged in a war activity
when the story opens. He is simply dividing coffee for his men. Instead of using his sword as an instrument
of war, he is using it as a tool to perform an everyday household chore. While engaged in an activity of ordered,
"mathematical," normality the lieutenant suddenly cries out, and the
situation is ordered and normal no longer.
At this crucial point the story presents a frozen scene in
which the lieutenant can only gaze "sadly, mystically" at the
"green face of a wood," while the men stand "statue like and
silent, astonished and awed by this catastrophe which happened when
catastrophes were not expected." As
is usual when one is struck unexpectedly, the lieutenant looks quickly at the
man near him "as if he suspected it were a case of personal
assault." When he realizes that the
man next to him is not the guilty party, he looks further for a cause. But all he sees is "the green face of a
wood." And indeed the answer to the
question: "What struck the
lieutenant"--the question that the lieutenant, the men and the reader ask
at this point--can only be: "the
green face of a wood."
Crane's control of the details of this situation further
suggests that the wood is the enemy. He
not only refuses to show us the person who fired the shot; he does not even say
that the lieutenant was shot at all. All
we see is the blood that mysteriously appears on his sleeve. Furthermore, it is the wood, not the supposed
enemy behind it, that is called "hostile." In fact, the wood dominates this first
section of the story. As the lieutenant
begins his trip back through the lines for medical aid he stares at it once
more; and the reader is forced to focus on it also as the men in silence
"stared at the wood, then at the departing lieutenant; then at the wood,
then at the lieutenant."
The wood as enemy is suggested by two more indirect references
in the second section of the story. When
the lieutenant goes back through the lines, he sees a general on a black horse
gazing over the lines of the blue infantry “at the green woods which veiled his
problems.” And at the end of this
section, as the lieutenant turns his eyes toward the battle itself, he sees
crowds of men standing and firing away, not at a concrete, observable enemy,
but at the “inscrutable distance.” With
the piling up of such images of the wood as a "mystery," as
"hostile," as something which "veils" one's problems, as
"inscrutable," as something one can only gaze at "sadly,
mystically"; we begin to realize that the lieutenant's enemy is the most
general human enemy, that the "war" in which he is engaged in is the
"war" in which human beings are always engaged--a war that, in our
everyday ordered activities, we often forget.
The green face of the wood that strikes the lieutenant and gives no
answer is the blankness we all face when something unexpected and mysterious
confronts us..
Moreover, the lieutenant's confrontation in section one of the
story is not only with the blank mystery of meaningless attack, but also with
the ultimate extension of that mystery--the absolute mystery of death. The men shy away from him as if his
"hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all
existence." They "fear vaguely
that the weight of a finger upon him might send him headlong, precipitate the
tragedy, hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown." The results of such a confrontation are that
the lieutenant becomes, at the same time, both lowly and dignified. The familiar sword he was using to divide the
coffee becomes a strange thing to him.
Puzzled with what to do with it, he looks at in a " kind of
stupefaction, as if he had been endowed with a trident, a scepter, or a
spade." The very metaphoric
transformation of the sword suggests both implications--the royal dignity and
authority of the scepter and trident, as well as the lowly earth-bound
subservience of the spade.
Although "a wound gives strange dignity to him who wears
it," and "men shy away from
this new and terrible majesty," the lieutenant "wears the look of one
who know he is the victim of a terrible disease and understands his
helplessness." Now we realize that
the terrible disease of which the lieutenant is a victim is the same disease of
which all human beings are victims --the disease of simply being human and therefore
susceptible to the mystery of the uncontrollable world outside and the ultimate
mystery of death.
In the third section of the story, the lieutenant, having
reached help behind his lines, faces a different response to his wound. Instead of being treated with the awe due
royalty, as he was earlier, he is now treated with the scorn due a child who
has been careless enough to get himself into trouble. The doctor's response to the lieutenant is
the final manifestation of his isolation.
Because he sees wounded men every day, the lieutenant is not special or
royal as he was before. Just the
opposite, he is beneath the doctor, "on a very low social
plain." The lieutenant becomes
merely an object that must be tended to precisely because he is a frail and
"brittle" human object susceptible to the "hostile" world
outside. In this story, the lieutenant
is the only one who has faced the significance of the “green face of the wood,”
and it is this that isolates him from all the others.
The lieutenant finally rebels. He fears the loss of the arm
will make concrete a much greater loss he has been moving toward throughout the
story--the loss of his familiar and ordered place in the world. But his rebellion makes no difference; and as
he gazes at the schoolhouse door, "as sinister to him as the portals of
death," we confront again the "veil" or "curtain"
referred to earlier in the story that hangs before the revelations of all
existence. We do not enter these
"portals" with the lieutenant and thus do not know what
"revelations" are made to him.
The loss of the arm is as mysterious as the wound itself. Instead, the story jumps ahead to a scene
perhaps several months later. As his
sisters, mother, and wife sob for a long time at the sight of the flat sleeve,
he stands shamefaced and says, "Oh, well. . . I don't suppose it matters
so much as all that." And Crane
sums up the story by saying, "And this is the story of how the lieutenant
lost his arm." Both statements are
obviously ironic, Crane's understatement giving us the clue to the irony of the
lieutenant's disclaimer.
We realize that this has not been a story of how the
lieutenant lost his arm. That event
occurred outside the given details of the story. The story itself presents the experience that
led up to the amputation. The lieutenant
realizes, just as we do now, that the women are only crying over the physical
loss of the arm. To them this is what
the story is about. But the lieutenant
now realizes that the physical loss is not so important. What is really important is the experience
the lieutenant has gone through--an experience structured as a short story
called "An Episode of War."
And this story is about the lieutenant's confrontation with the mystery
of the world and mankind's precarious situation in it.
I suggest that Professor Shen's singling out references to
so-called "feminization" is a reduction of the mysterious significance
of Crane's story. According to the New Critics of long ago, one of the
principle criteria of determining what Shen likes to call "subtext"
is to do a "close reading" of the entire story, not merely trace a
single cultural metaphor.
The concept of subtext is indeed an important aspect of what
distinguishes a great short story from a simple narrative, but it certainly is
not a new notion just because it has a new name.
